Shadow of the Hegemon

Rating:
Summary: Precocious Pests Pursue Peace....
Review: Well, Orson Scott Card is back again with another saga of the world run by pre-adolescents. His first book in the series, "Enders Game" was believable because Ender & his siblings were so superior to everyone around them that they could be viewed as aberrations. The next three, "Speaker for the Dead", "Xenocide" & "Children of the Mind" dealt primarily with adults so the genius kid wasn't an issue. Then came "Ender's Shadow" which told the story of Bean, a member of Ender's "jeesh" in Battle-School. The brilliance displayed by the infant Bean was less than believable but accounted for by Bean's back-story (which I won't give away if you haven't read it yet). Now though we are presented with not only Bean, Ender, Peter & Valentine as pre-pubescent saviors of humanity, we also get at least 10 other children manuevering politicians & armies. Mr. Card has lost me here.

The villain of both "Shadows" books is Achilles whom Bean has known since his days as a street kid in Rotterdam. Achilles is presented to the reader as an older street kid who originally was handicapped by a bad leg, & has developed a nasty sort of underhanded cunning to compensate. While the fact that Rotterdams mean streets could produce 2 children equally brilliant in strategic thinking is difficult enough to accept (especially when malnourishment & lack of education is taken into account), Achilles has somehow picked up a knowledge of classical literature along the way! The author completely lost this reader at that point.

The adults in "Shadow of the Hegemon" exist only to achieve objectives for the children who command them, or else they give them moral lectures. Orson Scott Card's Mormonism becomes particularly obtrusive during the latter. At one point Mrs. Wiggins lectures Bean & the reader on the joys of children (& lots of them!) for a number of pages. Later, the reader will probably be laughing over the mental image of a small 11 year-old personally commanding a platoon of adults. The scene where Achilles brokers peace between Pakistan & India is even more mind-blowing if not quite as funny to picture.

Still, "Shadow of the Hegemon" gets 4 stars due to it's suspenseful writing, fast pace & execution. I just hope Mr. Card is not burning himself out; each of his recent books seems successsively weaker than it's predecessor.

Rating:
Summary: Simple thriller lacks depth of previous books
Review: I ADORED Ender's game. But I loved Speaker for the Dead and Xeonocide even more. I read them both in three days, because the ideas and characters were fascinating to me.

I read Ender's Shadow eagerly, and loved revisiting Battle School with Bean, who I quickly fell in love with as an intriguing character.

And I was beyond excited when ANOTHER book in the Ender series came out. But I have to admit that this book lacks what Card does best: smart, intriguing development of character. Sure, we've got a good guy (Bean the Brilliant Ambitionless Mutant) pitted against a bad guy (Achilles the Psychopathic Power-Hungry Monster), and desperate world circumstances, but this book lacks heart. When Bean's vaction home is blown up, there is no commentary about how it would feel to be separated from your parents with a monster trying to kill you. When his surrogate mother is killed, there are maybe two sentences on his grief. When the awful truth of what he really is comes out, Bean barely notices it.

Moments that have been built up to since Ender's Game fall flat. There is little emotional intensity to this book, and finally the detailed "guesses" and leaps of intuition made are confusing and unbelievable. I wish Card had spent a little more time on the relationships between his characters and their growth as people, and a little less time on the uninteresting, fictional world stage.

But if you're an Ender fan, I still recommend the book. For me, just reading about the characters I loved originally is enough. But don't buy this book in hardback. And if you can, wait till it's at the library.

Rating:
Summary: Shadow of the Hegemon
Review: Earth has been saved from the Formics by Ender, but who will rise up to save the people of Earth from themselves? Shadow of the Hegemon is the hair tingling story of Bean and his adventures to save Earth from the plans of his power hungry archenemy Achilles.
This book is somewhat unbelievable, because many of the strategies used by characters in it would never work. Of these one is Achilles convincing the Russian, Chinese, and Indian government to forfeit all their power to him when he didn't even spend a month in Battle school, when there were many other children that had graduated.
If you look beyond the unbelievable parts of this book it will have you sitting on the edge of your seat and wanting to stay up all night reading it.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: Once again, I wasn't disappointed by this sequel to Ender's Game / Ender's Shadow. Card returns to what he does best - blending worldwide military and political strategy with character studies. For anyone who's read the previous Ender books, this will be hard to put down. I'll try not to reveal too much detail, but the story concerns the group of child military geniuses from Battle School and what happens to them after the bugger war when they return to Earth. (Ender and Valentine don't appear in the book at all.) However, most fans have long awaited more details about Peter, what he did on Earth, and how he rose to power. Other primary characters from previous books are Bean (main character from Ender's Shadow), along with Petra Arkanian and others.

The author has an amazing knowledge of military strategy. More amazing, though, are the riveting dialogues between his characters! (He writes such intelligent and witty characters. I often wish I was half as smart!) Lest the talk of global strategy make this book sound dry, let me assure you that it's not. I had to discipline myself not to finish it too soon. :) Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Too Much of the Wrong Thing
Review: I have been an avid reader of Orson Scott Card for years. The Ender's Quartet and Shadow i considered to be fantastic books although in different ways. Ender's Game was interesting while still action and suspense-filled. The next three were philosophical and fascinating. Ender's Shadow amazed me at the depth of the subplots. But Shadow Of The Hegemon seemed to fall flat. I was immensely dissapointed after reading the book. The plot seemed to follow the wrong people in the wrong amounts. Ender's jeesh, especially Petra, did not seem to be fleshed out in an interesting way. The majority of the book was talking about the kids, but they had very little personality. What made Petra any different than some "genius kid"? Bean had fascinating twists in Ender's Shadow, but nothing could be fleshed out throughout Hegemon, even Bean's state of being "not quite human" was quickly dismissed. THe plot lost track of the importance of people, and focused more on Tom Clancy style war tactics. I would have hoped for much more on the interaction between Peter and Bean. Peter's character was changed to drastically from Ender's Game. The psychotic-ness was still there in a way, but Card tried too hard to make him more "vulnerable". He should have expanded on the twists within peter's mind, not his basic humanity. THere were good points in all of this though. The plot flowed smoothly most of the time and was interesting enough to continue. There was suspense at all times to keep the reader reading. The reintroduction of Graff was a nice touch. This is a great book for an easy, adventurous read.

All in all, it was a decent book and a good read, but not even close to the standards expected from this series. It was no where near what could have been done to further expand the series.

Rating:
Summary: All is perfect,except one thing
Review: I have read through other 2 books in the Ender's series including Ender's Game and the Speaker for the Dead. Though it's really a pity that I didn't cover Ender's Shadow,I am still quite like this book,because Card's plot is just unresistable. You can never predict what is going on next. Also I like Card's feature of beginning every chapter with a small passage (emails, most times), they give you small hints or brief accounts of what is happening. It IS really a perfect book if there is not that thing. And that's why I didn't give it a full mark. As a Chinese, I cannot accept the fact that Achilles ended up going to China and that China appears in the book as an evil country. I think Russian peaple will get the same feeling when they saw Mother Russia be described as a country which would destroy the peace of the world for its own privilege. I believe China would never do such evil things.

Rating:
Summary: Entertaining
Review: Shadow of the Hegemon is a different type of story compared to Ender's Shadow or the trilogy that preceded it ... I think it's even a stretch to call it "science" fiction: more of a future political fiction instead. Think of it as the game of Risk on steroids.

That might be an oversimplification, but many times that's what the story feels like: a game. The players are Bean, Achilles, and Peter (and Petra and other Battle School alums to a lesser extent). The book centers around how they use their power (and sometimes, lack of power) in a struggle for world domination. The detail of, say, a Tom Clancy novel is left out, but the human side is more developed than a typical military/historical fiction.

Card's afterward is interesting to read as well. I'm glad that he decided to spend more time on Bean's extraction of Petra, although I think Card might've been well served to spend just a little bit more time on it, as the interaction between Achilles and Petra seemed to end right after Petra beats him up. Maybe Achilles was busy negotiating with China. Maybe Card just didn't know where to go from there and shifted his focuses elsewhere. Who knows. I was a little disappointed with how Sister Carlotta exited the story line as well ... not sure if Card's going to go into that more in the next books or if that really was the end there.

There are a couple parts in the plot that seemed like Card had an idea but couldn't figure out a plausible way to carry it out. The time when Bean, while shooting the breeze with a Battle School buddy, suddenly thinks that people are trying to kill him and they escape in the nick of time seemed a bit much. A couple of the political moves seemed a little sketchy as well: Russia was intimidated by China's power but Japan wasn't?

It seems like I've given the book more criticism than praise, but the few complaints I have did not detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. Bean's developing into quite an interesting character. I was surprised to read in the afterward that there are two books following this one (I had assumed that Card would wrap everything up in just one more book). I felt kind of like Card ran out of gas towards the end of the Ender trilogy ... here's hoping he can continue his success with the Bean series.

Rating:
Summary: Precocious Pests Pursue Peace....
Review: Well, Orson Scott Card is back again with another saga of the world run by pre-adolescents. His first book in the series, "Enders Game" was believable because Ender & his siblings were so superior to everyone around them that they could be viewed as aberrations. The next three, "Speaker for the Dead", "Xenocide" & "Children of the Mind" dealt primarily with adults so the genius kid wasn't an issue. Then came "Ender's Shadow" which told the story of Bean, a member of Ender's "jeesh" in Battle-School. The brilliance displayed by the infant Bean was less than believable but accounted for by Bean's back-story (which I won't give away if you haven't read it yet). Now though we are presented with not only Bean, Ender, Peter & Valentine as pre-pubescent saviors of humanity, we also get at least 10 other children manuevering politicians & armies. Mr. Card has lost me here.

The villain of both "Shadows" books is Achilles whom Bean has known since his days as a street kid in Rotterdam. Achilles is presented to the reader as an older street kid who originally was handicapped by a bad leg, & has developed a nasty sort of underhanded cunning to compensate. While the fact that Rotterdams mean streets could produce 2 children equally brilliant in strategic thinking is difficult enough to accept (especially when malnourishment & lack of education is taken into account), Achilles has somehow picked up a knowledge of classical literature along the way! The author completely lost this reader at that point.

The adults in "Shadow of the Hegemon" exist only to achieve objectives for the children who command them, or else they give them moral lectures. Orson Scott Card's Mormonism becomes particularly obtrusive during the latter. At one point Mrs. Wiggins lectures Bean & the reader on the joys of children (& lots of them!) for a number of pages. Later, the reader will probably be laughing over the mental image of a small 11 year-old personally commanding a platoon of adults. The scene where Achilles brokers peace between Pakistan & India is even more mind-blowing if not quite as funny to picture.

Still, "Shadow of the Hegemon" gets 4 stars due to it's suspenseful writing, fast pace & execution. I just hope Mr. Card is not burning himself out; each of his recent books seems successsively weaker than it's predecessor.

Rating:
Summary: the young genius
Review: This book by Orson Scott Card, is a very good sequel to Enders shadow. It gives more depth about the character known as bean. They tell about his personal life and how he struggled to stay alive. Bean is my favorite character in the Enders game series. He shows the most wits and learns the fastest. He develops emotion, which he has never felt before. Bean, ends up saving the world along with a team of super intelligent kids that think they are playing a game but in reality they are actually commanding star ships in a galaxy where the buggers reside.

Not only is Bean a survivor of 25 which 23 were burnt down, he ends up finding his parents and eventually meets his long lost bother. His savior, who is also like his mother, finds Enders brother Peter. Bean helps peter become Hegemon.

To me this is the best book of the series, because to me Bean was my favorite Character, because of his intelligence and his past experiances.

Rating:
Summary: A book that succeeds in spite of its flaws
Review: It's rare for me to only give a Orson Scott Card book three stars, but Card seems to have really stumbled with this one. Although the book is very entertaining, it also has some very serious flaws.

One major problem with Shadow of the Hegemon (and the one that I found to be the most bizarre) is that it doesn't really appear to be set in the future. Card never tells us exactly what year it's supposed to be, but we know that humanity has spent several generations fighting a major interstellar war, we've built fleets of starships with weapons capable of destroying entire planets, and we've unlocked the secrets of faster-than-light communication. Yet for some reason, virtually all of the technology - military and otherwise - in Shadow of the Hegemon seems to be from only a few years in the future. People are still flying around in helicopters, shooting gunpowder machine guns at each other, and generally living their lives and fighting in the way one would expect two or three years from now. The world's geo-political situation is also largely unchanged, with most of the world's nations characterized by political stereotypes from today. Although this in itself doesn't really ruin the book, it's all jarringly incongruous with the previous books in the series.

A second, more fundamental problem has to do with the way in which the main characters in the story interact with their world. The battle school children seem more like forces of nature than actual characters. They seem to be so far above the rest of humanity that they come to dominate everyone and everything they come into contact with, despite that fact that most of them are small children. The entire world seems to bend itself to their will, and they alone are able to successfully oppose each other. Of course Ender's character had that sort of importance in 'Ender's Game,' but there was also an elaborate backstory to explain how a single child came to have such an important role in deciding the fate of humanity. In 'Shadow of the Hegemon' it seems that Card again wanted to make his child characters pivotally important, but he never really comes up with a credible explanation for how any group of people - no matter how brilliant or well trained - could end up so incredibly influential in world affairs.

Despite all that, 'Shadow of the Hegemon' is still a very entertaining book. The plot is quite entertaining in spite of its problems with consistency and believability, and the action proceeds at a brisk pace. Although Card seems to give his battle school children far more credit than plausibility allows, they're all quite fascinating and well-developed characters. It's genuinely interesting to watch Bean, Petra, Achilles, and company spar with each other for world domination. Even with its flaws, Shadow of the Hegemon is still better than most of what you'll find on bookstore shelves.